The Armstrong Williams report, did you all see it??

[NVMojo]

Why Armstrong Williams Wants Us To Forgive and Forget
Feature Submitted by Bob Burton on Wed, 05/11/2005 - 08:23.
Topics: U.S. government | public relations | media | education
There's an old PR trick that if bad news can't be suppressed, its release should be stalled until late on a Friday afternoon or just before a holiday break. It's a trick that served the U.S. Department of Education well when, late on Friday April 15, it released its Office of Inspector General's damning final report into the $240,000 Armstrong Williams contract to promote the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation.

The strategy behind the late Friday afternoon news dump is simple: most media outlets will be squeezed for space to cover a late-breaking story, looming deadlines will ensure harried journalists don't have time to get much further than the executive summary, and by the time Monday rolls around, it will be seen as stale news by editors with the attention span of a gnat.

Reading the 20-page report, which was prompted by Greg Toppo's exposé on the Williams contract in USA Today, it's easy to see why the Education Department wanted to bury it. The report chronicles the deception, bungling and mismanagement behind the Williams contract.

While newspapers such as the Washington Post, L.A. Times, New York Times, and USA Today covered the Education Department report, most of the finer detail went unreported. (Surprisingly, none added a link on their websites to the actual report.)

More...

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3632

And here is the report, so very under-reported:

http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/a19f0007.html

[napi21]

1. The late Fri release is nothing new.

I used that for years in the business community. If you have good news, you release it Mon or Tues. If it's bad, you release it Fri afternoon...and as close to 4:30 as possible.

We need to promote this $250,000 info starting Monday AM in every outlet we have! You know most of the cable news is monitoring the blog sites and reporting on them too, so lets just DO IT!

[gumby]

2. "harried journalists " ???

Yeah, like they're soooo worn out from transcribing press releases?

The Saturday programs on the Cable "News" Channels are amazing. It's like there's no news on Saturday. It's all 'public interest' nonsense.

Every week-end I wonder why the supposedly 24/7 "news" channels shut down every Saturday and Sunday.

[Carolab]

3. Did you see the GAO's May 12th report regarding VNRs as propaganda?

http://www.gao.gov/atext/d05643t.txt

This is the accessible text file for GAO report number GAO-05-643T
entitled 'Video News Releases: Unattributed Prepackaged News Stories
Violate Publicity or Propaganda Prohibition' which was released on May 12, 2005.

<snip>

"HHS and ONDCP both commissioned and distributed prepackaged news stories and introductory scripts about their activities that were designed to be indistinguishable from news stories produced by private news broadcasters. In neither case did the agency include any statement or other indication in its news stories that disclosed to the television viewing audience (the target of the purported news stories) that the agency wrote and produced those news stories. In other words, television-viewing audiences did not know that stories they watched on television news programs about the government were, in fact, prepared by the government. We therefore concluded that those prepackaged news stories violated the publicity or propaganda prohibition."

[NightOwwl]

4. Same thing with pink slips.

The company gets rid of you on Friday, hoping that by Monday you will be nothing but a dim memory.